Borzivoj
3mo ago
Agreed - massacring relatives who might pose a threat is very widespread, but Chinese law was unusual in legitimating clan extermination for cases of real or imagined high treason. I seem to recall this was the fate of the sequence of imperial in-laws that dominated most of the Eastern Han (which makes you wonder why families kept putting that much energy into attaining that position).
Not sure why the famine would be more selective than all the wars and rebellions. Don’t think the evidence is good that they were ever stupid. Like the Armenians, they have a weirdly extensive and developed literature compared to their population size (probably around 750,000 at the time of the conquest IIRC). I think it’s more important that they had no indigenous tradition of living in cities (which were Norse and then English), which is where high civilization things tend to occur. After the conquest [edit: Norman, not Tudor], most of the best economic territory was in the hands of the major English lords, who were culturally oriented toward France and England.
Borzivoj
5mo ago
I’ve been led to believe, perhaps falsely, that this should only account for about 5 IQ points. I suspect (not epistemically well-founded) that the Christian non-Ashkenazi Jewish IQ advantage in the Middle East could derive partially from wealthier, more educated segments of society being more resistant to conversion (like recusants in England). Middle Eastern Christians sects and Jews (and maybe Druze, Yazidis, other religious groups? I’m not too familiar) always strike me as resembling unusually large, Indian-style jātis
I don’t care about immigrants one way or another at an emotional level and don’t have a strong opinion at a rational level. But everyone, always, everywhere, hates competition in the absence of strong countervailing factors. Some degree of hostility is virtually inevitable. Ways that tensions can be reduced, with historical examples: -receiving population is self-consciously hurting for warm bodies (steppe nomad confederations tending to accept any and all willing dwellers in felt tents, the widespread North American Indian practice of ‘adopting’ war captives as full tribe members, competing ethnonationalists courting ethnically ambiguous populations (I’m most familiar with Silesians, Masurians, and Kashubians. I’ve heard similar things about bilingual Ferghana valley dwellers (Turkic vs. Dari), Macedonian Slavs, “Catholic Serbs,” etc.) -immigrants are hard to tell apart from natives (similar physical appearance, language, etc.) -immigrants are already aligned with Ingroup and conspicuously oppressed by Outgroup (Huguenots in England/Germany, Irish in Spain and France, oligarchic/democratic exiles from competing Poleis in Archaic-Classical Greece) -immigrants are part of Outgroup but we need them to run certain machinery in the meantime (only works if they eventually assimilate) -immigrants have the same religion or readily convert -immigrants aren’t forbidden from eating with, marrying, or interacting socially with the host population (Gypsies and Jews are especially well-known offenders, but a fairly common problem - present to a certain extent with Catholics/Protestants apart from the food. Parsis would be similar if there were more than five of them left. Less of a whole problem if the whole society is like this already (India)). -immigrants are only competing with people with no voice or power (Germans/Christian sectarians/Jews in Medieval Eastern Europe, Indians in English Burma/Africa, etc.) Situation tends to rapidly degenerate during anarchy (Chmielnicki rebellion), when the central authority changes (Russian annexation of the pale of settlement), or when (which God forbid) the popular vote is introduced.
I’m sure there are others
Edit: It’s helpful to have a third, low-status group that’s already in place and against which new groups can identify themselves. This was probably helpful in integrating miscellaneous European types as Whites in the Americas.
Borzivoj
5mo ago
I thought the Polish and Czechoslovak governments-in-exile had been enthusiastic about the expulsion. Even the interwar Polish government sought to induce Germans to emigrate through the same sorts of measures as adopted against the Jews (e.g., selective nationalization of industries dominated by the wrong ethnicities). As far as I know it was only Belarusians and Ukrainians that they considered to be practically assimilable.
Borzivoj
6mo ago
I feel like I only ever see the following messaging these days
This is probably milieu-dependent. The denouncing Israel thing is something I only ever hear of at second hand, typically in media articles that (IMO) massively overstate the risk to American Jews. This is a rare occasion where I agree with Hanania:
What’s notable to me is the combination of a complete lack of violence along with the hysterical accusations of such and hyperbole going back and forth between the two sides. Everyone deep down knows that no one is going to get hurt, not by the police and not by the protestors, but that it is to their advantage to pretend as if this isn’t the case.
This is in a well-to-do professional environment (without many Jews to account for the pattern thanks to being in a nondescript Midwestern city). I was aware of the existence of pro-ethnic cleansing arguments among online ethnonationalist types, but I’d never encountered it in meatspace before last October, let alone from non-Jewish (!) normies.
Conversely, my Brother, who has similar object-level views on Israel-Palestine but works in Brussels, has had to explain that massacring Israeli civilians is bad, actually, regardless of what you think about the overall conflict.
Borzivoj
9mo ago
It implies also that, if you are not a good Catholic (as everyone else, because we are all sinners) at least you can find salvation by work (helping your communities, joining the public rites etc).
I think there has been a misunderstanding of Catholic doctrine somewhere.
Borzivoj
9mo ago
Thank you for 1-2, those are the sorts of reasons I’d be looking for. 3 seems like a reason for us to neuter them, dominate them, or nuke them ourselves before they can do it. As for 4, if they were somehow driven out of Israel, most of them would probably come here. Unless someone simultaneously nukes Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, we should have plenty of time to evacuate the more useful Ashkenazim during any semi-realistic genocide scenario (obviously if it somehow came to that, I’d support evacuating all of them on moral rather than practical grounds).
Borzivoj
9mo ago
The charges he’s making are too vague to be interpretable (as currently stated), but you’re also not giving a substantive answer. What’s are the concrete benefits we derive from their clientage that justifies the consumption of money and influence on their behalf? I don’t have any relevant background and don’t actually have an opinion on whether they’re worthwhile clients. If there are solid realpolitik reasons to support them, I’d respect that more than the moral arguments.
(Don’t endorse much of what Belisarius said, or only much weaker versions of some of it).
I don’t think we’d have a right to complain if North American Indians pulled an Amish/Hasidim and outbred us. I also don’t think it’s reasonable to begrudge them having resisted our expansion with violence, though without endorsing every single thing they did. (The Palestinian Arabs do have a very bad habit engaging in violence that’s both needlessly indiscriminate and ineffectual - the Cherokee didn’t really have the option of nonviolent resistance, whereas the Palestinians would probably have done much better for themselves with that approach than they did in reality).
One relevant difference between our northern Amerindians and the Palestinians is that the whole Zionist process was needless - some European country was going to roll over the North American tribal societies regardless of what Britain did. But Zionism-in-Palestine was a very complicated and very involved way to not achieve security, normalcy, or the new Soviet Jew renewal.
Borzivoj
10mo ago
Agree it can be anyone willing to take them in, or even anywhere they're strong enough to conquer themselves.
Borzivoj
10mo ago
The opposing argument will be that “Palestinian” as a distinct and/or overriding identity didn’t crystallize until the mid-20th century (there exist people arguing for earlier, have not read, can’t comment on quality of argument). Of course, pre-nationalist identity for non-Jati-like groups* was generally more local/regional than what replaced it, so it still wouldn’t make sense to “repatriate” them to other Arab countries.
To anticipate another counter-argument, there was some migration between Muslim regions (especially at urban and elite levels), so that some Palestinians have surnames indicating, e.g., Egyptian origin at some point. This is accurate, though the scale can be significantly exaggerated. My main complaint about this line of argument is that (except with very recent migrants) it makes about as much sense as “repatriating” all the Slovak Horváths to Croatia.
*Actual Hindu Jatis, but also Bosnian Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, Druze, Zoroastrians, etc. - (at least mostly) endogamous, religiously-defined groups with severe intercommunal purity barriers that reinforce common identity at a relatively early date.
Borzivoj
10mo ago
Broadly on your side in this sub-exchange, but puzzled how ‘thirdly’ fits with the claim that a Jewish state would have prevented the Holocaust. Palestine was not only well within Germany’s reach, but it was right next to their primary goal in North Africa. If the Germans had taken Egypt and the British had withdrawn to Iraq, it seems like the Palestinian Jews would have been screwed regardless of their relative population share - if Anita Shapira is to be believed, the Yishuv’s plan (such as it was) was to cooperate so as not to give a pretext for reprisals.
Borzivoj
10mo ago
I actually disagree with RR’s response here - allowing refugees to return after a war is historically normal, not allowing it is somewhat unusual (though by no means unheard of). Rulers usually didn’t care what ethnicity their subjects were in the past, and usually preferred mass forced conversion to expulsion except in special circumstances. Why not let the expelled Palestinians return (since their expulsion probably wasn’t actually planned)? Democracy creates a very strong incentive to engage in (relatively soft in this case, to the Yishuv’s credit) ethnic cleansing.
Borzivoj
10mo ago
I don’t think we know this - I don’t think Hizbullah & Hamas together can take Israel. Iran would have huge logistical difficulties intervening directly and it is… not obvious that would succeed, even if Israel didn’t have nukes.
Borzivoj
10mo ago
When you’re right you’re right. Though the total population doesn’t seem suitably glorious. Maybe we could vassalize Georgia and Armenia and diplo-annex them in 10 years?
Borzivoj
10mo ago
Who ought we to be conquering if we were appropriately aspirational toward greatness?
Borzivoj
10mo ago
They could send them to Uganda so we could come full circle.
To be fair, I expect the Euro component in ADOS people is also mostly from slave owners.
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